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About this project

The problem: When moodle designed their database system most popular database systems did not support foreign keys (see this Github issue or this moodle forum discussion). Therefore, they decided to implement them software side in moodle. As of moodle 4.2 this is still the case. As a result it is not possible to automatically generate useful database diagrams for moodle databases as they require foreign keys to show relations between tables.

The solution: This repository contains a script that creates rudimentary SQL CREATE TABLE statements for all tables in the moodle database. It implements just enough to create database diagrams as this is the only target of this script. It is very likely that the created database will not work with moodle.

example database diagram
Example database diagram with all columns except primary keys hidden

compatible moodle versions

It is known that moodle 3.9, 3.11, 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 are working.

How to use

The following assumes you are using WSL. It should work like that on linux as well.

You need a database running on your machine with the following configuration.

db-system: mariadb
host: localhost
port: 3312
user: root
password: a \

It is hardcoded in the script, but you should be able to change that easily. You can use the following docker-compose file to start a database with the correct configuration:

version: '3'
services:
  db_moodle:
    image: docker.io/bitnami/mariadb:10.6
    ports:
      - 3312:3306
    environment:
      MARIADB_USER: blub
      MARIADB_PASSWORD: blub
      MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD: a
      MARIADB_DATABASE: blub
      MARIADB_CHARACTER_SET: utf8mb4
      MARIADB_COLLATE: utf8mb4_unicode_ci
    volumes:
      - db_moodle_data:/bitnami/mariadb
    restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
    db_moodle_data:
  1. Create a file list_of_xmldb_files.txt with the paths to all install.xml files of your moodle installation. You can do this under linux with the following command:
find /path/to/moodle -name install.xml > list_of_xmldb_files.txt
  1. Run the script with python3 convert_xmldb_to_create_table_statements.py > create_tables.sql to create a file with all SQL CREATE TABLE statements.
  2. If the database diagram already exists (eg. from a previous run), drop it. echo "DROP DATABASE diagram;" | mysql -h localhost -P 3312 -u root -pa
  3. Create the database and create the tables as described in the create_tables.sql file: echo "CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS diagram;" | mysql -h localhost -P 3312 -u root -pa && cat create_tables.sql | mysql -h localhost -P 3312 -u root -pa -D diagram
  4. Now you can use any tool that can connect to a mariadb and create database diagrams from it (eg jetbrains IDEs or MySQL Workbench).

Attention: Moodle has a lot of tables. You will have to create a selection of tables you want to show in the diagram.

usefull commands

List all tables with foreign keys to a given table name:

SELECT TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, CONSTRAINT_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE WHERE REFERENCED_TABLE_NAME = '<table_name>' AND REFERENCED_TABLE_SCHEMA = 'diagram';